Saturday, November 21, 2009

Flashing BIOS in Ubuntu Linux without floppy

I was trying to update the flash BIOS of an old ECS K7SOM+, a 1 Ghz-era AMD Athlon motherboard. The problem is that most older motherboard flash upgrades are designed with a DOS bootable floppy in mind. I have no DOS, no Windows, no floppy drive, and no floppy disks. Fortunately, there's UNetbootin, a tool design specifically to make bootable USB flash drives from Linux. Here are the general instructions for Ubuntu Linux users:

Use gparted to create a single FAT16 formatted partition on the flash drive.

You can install gparted using apt-get install gparted

You may need to first umount the USB flash drive before you can partition and format it.

- the USB drive must be unmounted prior to using gparted to reformat it (at least on my Ubuntu system, HAL automatically mounts USB drives upon insertion).

- "sudo apt-get install unetbootin" did not work for me; nor did Synaptic list it in the repositories. Instead, I downloaded it from here:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/unetbootin-linux-latest

- At this point, the USB drive needs to be mounted again. Simplest way is to remove and reinsert - that should automatically mount it.

- Permissions need to be changed on unetbootin to allow execution:

#sudo chmod a+x unetbootin

- To run unetbootin, simply double-click its icon.

Again, thanks - there are a ton of methods I found via Google, all different, some of which flat-out won't work with today's larger BIOS updates (ie creating a floppy image and burning to a CD - you're left with only 1.44MB, and a lot less after making it bootable - my BIOS update of my MSI CR600 laptop is 2.1MB alone!).

I have a Toshiba NB205, and I am trying to update the BIOS. I have formatted a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer, used Unetbootin to install FreeDOS, and rebooted into the USB drive by resetting the boot sequence via F2. The FreeDOS menu comes up--but I don't know which of the six options to choose. The first option looks wrong, because if it starts to install FreeDOS, does that mean it will overwrite something on my hard drive? I have looked through the FreeDOS site, and I cannot find a place where it describes the boot options.

I took a risk and chose option #1 (install FreeDOS) and arrived at an A:\ prompt. What then? How to I execute the NB200-210-WIN.exe file?

Hi everyone.. I have the same problem. I need to update my BIOS in my dell mini 9, because I am having some troubles with my battery.I created my USB as you indicated. When I rebooted, there are 4 options available. The first one is to install FreeDOS in my computer and the other 3 are to run as Live Session. Which one should I run?I tried with the Live ones, but there is no B: or C: drives. I am localized in drive A: where there is a DRIVE folder, when I get in, there is not my BIOS file.Any suggestions??

As per step #3, you need to copy your flash bios and flash utility onto the flash drive. Then you would need to reboot off the flash drive and run the flash utility command. If all of this sounds foreign, then please read up on flash bios else where on the Internet. These instructions were meant for folks who have flash their bios in the past with floppy disks but no longer have a floppy drive.

For some reason it would immediately drop back into the A:\ directory after I did CD C:\, so I had to run the bios update from A: prompt with the command C:\biosupdate.exe (made up bios update name...too lazy to type the odd Dell one). And I did choose the first option, to install freedos, which is counterintuitive.And it worked perfectly, thank you!Nick

This is DOS... CD C:\ doesn't make sense to DOS. You have to type 'C:' to, as they called it, "log into the C drive". CD only moves you around the device you are on. It can't be used to change which device you are on.

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I am a software developer with about 6 years of experience in various roles such as a university researcher, independent consultant, and enterprise developer.

My criteria for good software code can be reduced to a single axiom: Good code is easily testable code. This is based on my belief that software code are ultimately theories of how a business process should work. And it is well-accepted in the scientific community that good theories are testable theories. So, good code is testable code.

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